Dynamic object grasping by a triple-fingered robotic hand

This paper deals with dynamic object grasping and position control by using a triple-fingered robotic hand with hemispherical soft finger tips. In the authors’ previous works, a dynamic object grasping method by using a pair of robotic fingers, called “Blind Grasping”, which does not need to use any external sensing, was proposed. However, it is so far assumed that spinning motion around the opposite axis for the object does not occur during the overall movement, because there are only two opposite fingers and thereby the spinning is uncontrollable. By introducing a surplus finger in addition to a pair of robotic fingers, this spinning can be inhibited and it becomes controllable. In this paper, a triple-fingered robotic hand system with nonholonomic constraints is modeled, and a control input to realize stable grasping with object position control is proposed. Its usefulness and effectiveness are illustrated through some numerical simulation results.